[mrec]

> Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that?

If only I'd written a second sentence directly after the one you quoted which could have answered such questions...

I want lots of housing built too, and I want prices to collapse and stay collapsed, and I want Mark Carney tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, but as you say we seem to have become congenitally useless at building houses in this country.

By all means let's work on improving that, but we're probably looking at more decades even in the best case. I think the sentiment and finance and speculative aspects of the problem could be tackled much more quickly if the politics align to allow it.

[lhopki01]

While I agree that buy to let inflates prices a tiny bit the biggest issue is still lack of supply. For all the cheap credit out there many can still not get a house. It's not that they can't afford to pay the mortgage (often mortgages are cheaper than renting) it's that they can't get a mortgage big enough because you can only get a mortgage at 5 times your salary.

In the best case if developers were forced to build once they had planning permission rather than sitting on land and the government built houses like it used to the problem would be mostly gone within a decade.